The Art Of Flight Is Coming

After a long wait, The Art Of Flight is finally releasing! We’re gearing up for the premiere with an epic photo gallery from TransWorld Senior Photographer Scott Serfas’ Brain Farm adventure in Alaska’s Tordrillo Range. These photos were first published in the January 2011 issue of TransWorld SNOWboarding along with the text below. Be sure to catch the movie in theaters—the full tour schedule is here.

The Best Biggest Greatest Trip Ever

An Alaskan Adventure Of Epic Proportions

Huge claims. Even with Travis Rice, John Jackson, and Mark Landvik on the trip, photographer Scott Serfas came back from two weeks shooting in Alaska’s remote Tordrillo Range for Rice’s forthcoming film, The Art Of Flight, claiming it like a freshman after his first college kegger. Everything was the “craziest, best, biggest, sickest, heaviest ever…” The thing is, Serfas ain’t no freshman, he’s more of a “Frank The Tank” in snowboard media. He’s been here for years. He’s seen and shot it all and yet we could only scratch our heads at his giddy e-mails, claiming that “this trip was the best snowboarding trip in history.” Too bad they couldn’t smuggle a writer along on the trip. We were stuck with a secondhand account from our key photographer with a vocabulary limited to just three adjectives: best, biggest, and greatest.

On the one hand, we figured Serfas was just drunk on the Brain Farm Kool-Aid: the big-budget, high-tech production company that makes the rest of snowboard filmmaking look like kid’s stuff. Of course, this part is true-Serfas was under the spell. Perspectives get a bit skewed when you’re eating steak and lobster every night and flying around in helicopters with money blowing out the windows. The crew boasts more and better camera equipment than a National Geographic expedition and burns more heli fuel than a whole Army Apache squadron. And on this trip, Rice’s entourage was up to their usual tricks: flying flat-screens into their remote lodge to watch movies on the down days, and shooting high-powered military weaponry to stave off “boredom” when the clouds came in. But when the sky broke, the dudes definitely charged.

This collection of exclusive images provides a glimpse of the madness and scope of this mission with John Jackson sending some of the “biggest, highest airs ever” … which, according to Serfas, he rode into completely blind. Where Travis rode vertical Alaskan spines airing into and out of his lines with the “casualness of someone dropping into a snowboard park.” In case you haven’t figured it out by now, it’s a pretty big deal.